Your Cash Register Could Be Hurting Your Business: Here Are 7 Ways It Does This

Companies, Restaurant & Hospitality

It wouldn’t make sense for you to intentionally buy a machine that will hurt your business.

But you may unintentionally have.

And the machine in focus here is the cash register.

While the cash register has been in operation for many years, the advent of a cashless society is rendering it obsolete. Or nearly so.

To use a cash register, you need a standby staff to operate it. This staff will be responsible for taking and recording orders manually, and entering the amount into the machine. The problem with this model is that it is largely prone to errors and is also inefficient.

However, those are not the only reasons you may need to stop using this piece of equipment.

Operating a cash register could be hurting your business in more ways than you realize. In this article, we’d be exploring 7 ways cash registers could be doing more harm than good to your business.

But first…

Why Do Businesses Still Use The Cash Register?

There are 2 major reasons some businesses still use the cash register – fear and ignorance.

For some business owners, switching from the cash register to a more modern alternative is a pretty scary exercise. This is often because of the amount of money that may be required to purchase new equipment, install them, and train staff to operate them.

For others, they are simply unaware of the benefits of using modern alternatives to the cash register like a POS. Many business owners may not even know that there are devices that have been created to help businesses better deal with daily transactions.

Whatever the case, here are 7 ways using a cash register may be hurting your business:

Sluggish Service

If you run a business that is slow-paced with few customers, then a cash register may do just fine. However, in the case where you have a fast-paced business like a restaurant, you may want to consider ditching the cash register.

A cash register doesn’t give your staff the mobility they need to offer your customers a smooth service.

First off, it makes it difficult for your staff to enter and process transactions. Unlike with a POS, your staff will have to take orders down using a pen and paper or have to go back and forth to the counter to enter an order.

I believe it’s clear to see how this affects your business. This makes your service slow and can irritate your customers.

A better alternative to this is to use a POS system. Your staff can use an iPad to take orders from customers and pass it wirelessly to another staff to process the payment.

It’s Difficult To Tell What Your Top-Selling Products Are

The only thing your cash register is good for is showing you the total sales amount.

Beyond that, there’s nothing you can know.

And if you run a business, you need to know what your top-selling and lowest-selling products are. You can’t afford to be in the dark on what’s moving and what isn’t. Knowing this stops you from guessing and helps you make informed restock decisions.

A cash register cannot give you that.

Therefore, you want to consider using a more robust system that not only gives you the total sales amount, but what’s moving; what isn’t; how much each customer spends per visit; when you have the highest customer visits, and more.

It Encourages Stealing

Using a cash register, you may notice a mismatch between your daily/monthly sales and what you have in the can. I guess you already know what that means – your employees are stealing from you!

That shouldn’t come as a shock when you operate a transaction system that exposes your employees to raw cash. A report shows that over 75% of all workplace thefts are committed by staffs.

Employee theft can eat away at your profit and cause you significant loss over a long period. That’s what you get for using a cash register.

And so, the earlier you tackle this problem, the better for your business.

Fortunately, with a POS, all your sales can be tracked and securely stored. Your staff will have to type into the POS when they take every single order, including upsells.

What’s more?

A POS gives you the option to determine who can process or cancel a transaction. This way, you are sure that no one will be getting a free meal or messing with the figures.

You Find It Hard To Properly Manage Staff Scheduling

Overstaffing and understaffing can be a huge problem if not properly managed.

As a business owner, you need to know your busiest periods and vice versa. However, it’s impossible to know your peak and off-peak periods when you only use a cash register.

And the result is often terrible. You may usually find yourself overstaffed during off-peak periods costing you money on staff payment. Or being understaffed during peak periods thereby overwhelming your staff, which leads to a poor customer experience.

The solution to this is to use a combination of a POS system and a scheduling platform. Alternatively, you could integrate your guest Wi-Fi with a Wi-Fi marketing and analytic platform like SpotOn Wi-Fi while using a staff scheduling software.

SpotOn gives you the ability to gather valuable customer data including peak and off-peak periods.

Human Errors Will Be Rampant

Operating a cash register means your staffs will have to take orders by hand.

And since no one’s perfect it automatically means there will be tons of human errors. These errors may occur as a result of miscommunication between staffs or servers mixing up customers’ orders.

Whatever the case, human errors lead to loss of time and money. And serving customers the wrong item causes a terrible experience for your customers. You can be sure to get a bad review, or two.

You don’t want that do you?

Therefore, you may want to consider using POS. This is because a POS will help eliminate the extra ordering process making it shorter and faster. Basically, it helps to reduce the amount of human errors in your daily operations, or eliminate it completely.

You Can’t Properly Track Inventory

Your cash register won’t help you track your inventory.

If at all, you may have to do so manually and that can be a pretty tedious exercise. As a business owner, you should be aware that failing to track inventory can cause you to overstock or understock, none of which is good for business.

Overstocking means you are throwing away money on items that may not sell out fast. Understocking could mean that you can’t meet the needs of all your customers.

A more robust system would help you know what you have left and what is exhausted. This way you aren’t losing money or customers.

It Leaves Your Business Data Exposed

Though cash registers only records little data such as total daily sales, that little data needs to be protected. Unfortunately, your cash register can’t do that for you because the data is stored in the cash register.

Imagine what would happen if there’s a fire or flood or break-in. All your data would go in a flash.

And so, you need to switch to a system that secures your business data with cloud technology. This way, you not only have your data stored securely, but also easily accessible from anywhere.

In conclusion…

Looking at these downsides, it is easy to see why you need to switch from using the cash register to a system with more robust functionality. I understand it’s quite an investment to switch to new technology and systems. However, the effect on your business is profound.

More so, if you are considering moving over the POS system, you may want to consider integrating it with SpotOn Wi-Fi. This helps you garner more customer data than your POS alone.

This data will help you make more informed businesses decisions. For instance, ordering bigger stock when you are nearing your peak period and vice versa. The data will also help you understand your customers’ better and tailor your products to fit their exact needs.

Get in touch with us now and we’d show you how it works.